Wireless mesh networks are becoming ever more popular. In a wireless mesh network, e.g., a wireless mesh network that conforms to one of the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) standards, wireless access points (APs) are coupled together as mesh nodes, called mesh access points (mesh APs) in a mesh via a wireless backhaul. One mesh node is coupled to a wired network. A routing protocol is used to route between the different mesh nodes. Such multi-hop routes form the backhaul network for the mesh. The routes between mesh access points typically follow a tree topology, with the root of the tree called the root access point (root AP, RAP, and root mesh AP), and typically connected to a wired network. The access network is for transport of data, e.g., from a client station of a mesh access point to a node in the wired network. If the mesh access point of the client station is several hops from the root AP in the tree topology, the transport of the packets from that access point to the root AP is along the backhaul of the mesh network.
To support various integrated services involving time-sensitive data, such as voice over IP (VoIP) and multimedia services with a certain quality of service (QoS) requirement in wireless networks, resource provisioning is a major issue. Call admission control (CAC) is a provisioning strategy to limit the number of call connections into the networks in order to reduce the network congestion and call dropping. CAC is also an issue for wireless mesh networks. In addition to the issues that exist for all wireless networks, a wireless mesh network uses a multi-hop radio backhaul network to transport traffic. It may be that there is some medium contention that can prevent real-time applications, like voice, from operating properly. To provide call admission control in a wireless mesh network, it is advantageous to include backhaul CAC to account for the limited capacity of the backhaul network.
Typically, a wireless mesh network topology is formed by the nodes of a network establishing links between themselves according to one or more metrics, called routing metrics herein, such as the link speed to a neighbor, interference, the signal-to-noise ratio, bit error rate (BER), packet error rate, and so forth. Such routing metrics may not help build call capacity for time sensitive data for which the QoS is important.